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A bootable CD image with a retro game in a single tweet
Previously: security engineer at Square/Block, co-author of HackLang, put the 's' in https at Facebook/Meta. Maker of CTFs.
Topics /
Games & Graphics
The most popular blog posts about games & graphics on Hacker News. 117 posts.
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How DOOM fire was done
The Game Engine Black Book: DOOM features a whole chapter about DOOM console ports and the challenges they encountered. The utter failure of the 3DO, the difficulties of the Saturn due to its affine texture mapping, and the amazing "reverse-engineering-from- scratch" by Randy Linden on Super Nintendo all have rich…
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Why did I spend 1.5 months creating a Gameboy emulator? (2017)
For me, the most favorite type of a computer program is an emulator. Being able to run code from a completely different hardware architecture always seemed like a magic. The old computers are great on their own, so this kind of connection between historic machines and the modern computing environment feels almost like…
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The Game of Everything, Part 1: Making Civilization
If my gravestone says, “Sid Meier, developed Civilization,” I’m happy with that. It’s a game I’m happy to be known for.
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GPU Fluid
Benedikt Bitterli's Portfolio
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On generative algorithms
An illustrated essay on generative algorithms written by Anders Hoff.
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My adventures getting Disney’s Moana island scene to render well with Pbrt
Adventures in rendering the Moana island scene with pbrt, collected together for your convenience.
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The Making of Underrun – A WebGL Shooter in 13kb of JavaScript
I participated in this year's js13kGames , a JavaScript game development competition with a file size limit of 13kb, including code, assets and everything else. My entry was Underrun , a twin stick shooter using WebGL.
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Confessions of an Unreal Engine 4 engineering firefighter
Author's Note After Release I'm really blown away by the reception of this article. It has spread far wider than I could have ever imagined. The many comments and discussions it has prompted that essentially confirm what I believe is truth by not just fellow engineers but many
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The Game Engine Black Book: Doom
The Game Engine Black Book: DOOM is now available for purchase. It is being released exactly 25 years after DOOM.zip was first published on the University of Wisconsin FTP server in December 1993. You can get it at the following locations: - Amazon ( USA , France , UK , and many more). - Google Books ( here with no…
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Playing battleships over BGP
BGP is the glue of the internet. For a protocol that was produced on two napkins in 1989 it is both amazing and horrifying that it runs almost all of the ISP to ISP interactions and is now a very fundemental part of the internet.
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How the Dreamcast Copy Protection Was Defeated
After I shipped the DOOM Black Book , I took some vacation in Japan where I was able to play Ikaruga on a real arcade at Taito HEY in Akihabara. The experience reignited my interest in SEGA's ultimate video game console, the Dreamcast. There is a lot of documentation available online which made the studying process…
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Introduction to A* (1997)
Movement for a single object seems easy. Pathfinding is complex. Why bother with pathfinding? Consider the following situation:
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Books I used to develop a game engine
If you have decided to develop your game engine, you may be wondering where to start, what books to start reading, etc. If you are in this situation, I recommend getting a copy of the following books:
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Deconstructing the Water Effect in Super Mario Sunshine
Note: The demos below require WebGL2 support . If you are running a browser without WebGL 2 support, user “petercooper” on Hacker News has helpfully recorded a video and GIFs and for me.
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The Mathematics of 2048: Optimal Play with Markov Decision Processes
Finding provably optimal strategies for 2048 using Markov Decision Processes
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Visualizing quaternions: An explorable video series
Explaining how quaternions, a four-dimensional number system, describe 3d rotation.
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The Rubik's Contraption
A collaboration with Jared . Before any build log, here's a video: That was a Rubik's cube being solved in 0.38 seconds. The t...
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Lessons learned while developing Age of Empires 1 Definitive Edition
In late 2016 I began helping Forgotten Empires on Age 1 DE , a UWP app shipping in the Windows Store on Feb 20th. I only helped occasionall...
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The Graphic Art of Incredibles 2
I remember seeing the first Incredibles film in college with a few friends. We went on opening night and the theater was packed. I remember thinking that the way the movie opened with the old film footage of a younger Mr Incredible, Elastigirl and Frozone being interviewed was such a different way t
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So You Want to Compete with Steam
I get a lot of pitches for "Steam competitors." 99% of them are doomed to failure, but the vast majority are doomed before they even start.
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Doing Windows, Part 5: A Second Try
The beginning of serious work on the operating system that would come to be known as OS/2 left Microsoft’s team of Windows developers on decidedly uncertain ground. As OS/2 ramped up, Windows ramped down in proportion, until by the middle of 1986 Tandy Trower had just a few programmers remaining on his team. What had…
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Writing a Game Boy emulator
I've always wanted to write an emulator from scratch, but I've held off for a long time because it's probably the most advanced programming project I've ever wanted to do.
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Wing Commander II
If there was ever any doubt inside Origin Systems that Chris Roberts’s Wing Commander was destined to join Ultima as the company’s second great franchise, it was banished the moment the first game in the new series was released on September 26, 1990, and promptly sold by some accounts 100,000 copies in its first month…
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Atari Tempest: Dave Theurer’s Masterpiece
It’s a brave man who tries to criticize Atari’s seminal groundbreaking game Tempest. More than any other classic arcade game, Tempest hit the arcade scene like a juggernaut. Nothing lik…
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